Year: 2024
Type: report
Abstract: Commonly used measures of socioeconomic inequalities in mortality, such as the slope and the relative index of inequality, are based on summary measures of the group-specific age-at-death distributions (e.g.life expectancy).While this approach is informative, it ignores valuable information contained in the group-specific distributions.We apply and evaluate a novel measure of socio-economic inequality in mortality.Leveraging a metric of statistical distance, our Population Total Variation (PTV) measure is sensitive not only to changes in the means or variances, but also to broader mortality changes that affect distributional shapes.The PTV also allow the levels and trends of socioeconomic inequalities in mortality to be decomposed into mortality changes versus changes in the composition of the population.We use mortality data by socioeconomic groups to assess mortality inequalities with both established measures and our proposed PTV.Our findings suggest that levels and trends in mortality inequalities computed with the PTV differ compared to other conventional summary-based measures.The method we propose can be applied to any context where mortality rates are available by socio-economic groups.We conclude that measuring distributional similarities in mortality enhances our understanding of between groups inequalities in mortality. What does this paper add• We apply and evaluate a novel measure of socio-economic inequality in mortality.• Using distributional differences to quantify socioeconomic inequalities in mortality can alter our assessment of levels and trends of such inequalities across populations.• The proposed measure further allows to decompose either levels or trends of socioeconomic inequalities in mortality into two separate components: mortality changes versus changes in the composition of the population.• We measure socio-economic inequalities in mortality in two applications with different data requirements: educational groups and groups defined by an area-level deprivation measure.
Language: English
Subfield: Health
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4394992558